Nick Van Wiggeren, PlanetScale | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hey, welcome great good to be here at AWS re:invent in Las Vegas 2022. And we're at the tech strong studio in the win in our special Suite or interviewing and having great conversations with folks and research meetings and all kind of good things speaking of which our next guest.

This is Nick Van wiergren who is vpf engineering with Planet scale. Yeah. Welcome Nick.

Thank you for having me. I always appreciate you taking the time out. It's always blessed.

It's a great it's good to be talking with you. I love love talking about database stuff. So we're gonna jump into that but tell people about yourself and Planet scale.

Yeah. So like you said, my name is Nick Van wigger and I am the VP of engineering here at Planet scale. And what we are is a serverless my SQL compatible database built on top of some cncf open source technology like the tests.

So it's a managed service. We run the database for you the design to be used with serverless applications and kind of at what we call outrageous scale things that only the biggest companies can dream of reaching interesting. Well, you know in serverless brings up a whole different class.

Applications and things it's more than just, you know, it's not there and that it is we don't need it. It goes away. That's true.

But talk about what kind of applications are people using serverless for and getting it. Yeah, just from it. That's a great question.

So when we say serverless, you know, it can be kind of a misnomer. It runs on servers, you know, they still exactly you know, they're still there. Yeah, we haven't been able to get rid of those yet.

But the idea is, you know, the serverless kind of mindset is applications that can scale down to zero or applications that can scale all the way up to near Infinity. So what you see people doing is hitting things like connection limits or cold start problems or things like that. So we really built Planet scale not just to not run on servers we built it to run on servers but to empower developers who are using new serverless technologies like Lambda and scaling their workflow out.

We saw existing databases kind of couldn't keep up. So we built Planet scale to kind of help them out and give them the tools they need interesting. So what about traditional databases couldn't keep up.

Is it the time to build up the cash and load data into you know, whatever answer. Whatever query is going to be coming and query optimization or what are some of the challenges that yeah sequel database is not going to quite be up to Snuff great question. So I think the biggest one that people run into is just connection limits, you know, if you've got every lamb does a new connection and you say you can go from a hundred to a thousand to 10,000 lambdas and a couple minutes.

Well, a lot of databases don't handle 10,000 connections. Well, so we actually just had a blog post where we put a planet scale database through a million concurrent connections all kind of running queries and so little things like that or you know, you have a database now, it needs more resources. You got to go maybe create a new one copy a copy the data over failover resize and you know, that's kind of costly expensive but I plan at scale we just go.

Okay, you need more resources. No problem. Click a button, let the cloud do the rest and all the sudden you've got double the resources.

So it's just kind of help in that zero to scale helping people just not think about the limitations of traditional databases interesting. If you don't mind me ask you what kind of things you have to do to be able to cut that connection time. Yeah down and still have And all things you need to have that's a great question.

So we actually just released a few months ago native JavaScript driver for Planet scale and that actually took quite a bit of engineering work. So traditionally right you make up my SQL connection. It's a brand new connection you initiate you've got to do the round trip the back and forth and then it's a stateful kind of TCP connection heavyweight.

So we actually built a brand new kind of custom Edge load balancer that lets us do the querying over HTTP so you can use you know, a worker you can use a system that doesn't have arbitrary TCP connections super fast cold starts and things like that because it all just happens over the web. So we've actually gone in and we said, okay, you know again, what's the use case? What are people trying to do?

They're trying to deploy Dino. They're trying to deploy all these Edge JavaScript functions where they getting held up. They're getting held up with cold starts with connection limits.

So still uses TLS. So it's still secure no matter kind of where it goes, but it's also performant. You can send a query in an HTTP request without having to do all the back and forth and Kind of connection nonsense really taken that part of it out of the application infrastructure stack and putting it into your exact code.

If you yeah, you know we had before we had people kind of running proxies in their local infrastructure. They'd connect the Lambda to the proxy the proxy to the database and we said look, you know, we can do it better not because we're super skilled, but we've already got the database. We'll just put the load balancer in front of it and kind of handle it for you.

And that's just again that's part of that like kind of getting into the guts of what is serverless. What are people really trying to do and then giving them a better alternative to what exists now? Is probably what's the most misunderstood thing about serverless other than there is actually there.

Well, you know, I think people misunderstand why it's an advantage and how to use it. Well, so I see this a lot people talk about the cloud they talk about serverless and you say oh it's more expensive than running my own Prem. It's more expensive than using ec2.

If you use it, right the idea that you can scale up to Infinity you can scale down to zero you can get stuff shipped and deployed really quickly. There's no kind of capacity bursting you have to do to get a new release out if you Orient your business if you Orient your Dev team around what serverless means you can increase your velocity you can increase your time to delivery super fast. But if you just copy over the way that you've written software before and try to shoe horn it into a serverless model.

Yeah, it's gonna look the same and it might just be more expensive. So I think to really get through it and why we talk about serverless, even though it's not serverless is it's a mindset. It's a deployment strategy.

It's a kind of tenant set of core values that if you kind of adhere to then you get the advantage of serverless. It's interesting because we oftentimes bring our current metaphor or mindset model of how we construct software or think about the architecture things. Sometimes that's transferable.

Sometimes parts of it are sometimes everybody then. Is some things you just have totally rethink. Yeah, I think that's a little bit about serverless totally like, you know, you still do cicd and stuff like that in the serverless world.

But the way that you do deploys in cicd, for example, you want to do it right? You've got to rethink. What's the Paradigm in my Lambda?

What's the Paradigm in AWS and you can't just shoehorn your old practices to that or you'll end up with kind of two problems instead of one. Yeah some big container. You don't need her.

Yeah, huge huge container. You should you know, they're like, wait a minute. Isn't this just a VM?

And yeah it is. Yeah, you know, then you see you got to get away from that a little bit but it isn't the edge a great place also for serverless and yeah given the distribution of the edge and where you want to bring up, you know, instance those of that or the fewer large number of them you want to be able to do that anywhere and yeah now you've got really truly dining. Yeah infrastructure.

I mean, you know, the the, you know, the the last five years or so the amount that we've been able to give people the tooling that the cloud has given people you can get an application running and 25 different data centers around the world with the click of A button. I mean when I first started out that was a dream, you know, you'd be out there buying servers and all these different data centers and figuring out the network. Nope, click a button, you know click some some checkboxes and you have a global application.

Pretty stunning honestly, sometimes I think how lucky we are, you know in the last few years. Yeah. I don't know if you if you see this as a good use case one of the descriptions I use is.

Someday, I thought electric cars will be everywhere. We'll have Etc. But today, you know think people don't realize the amount of data that's translated down right when you get home and plug in and rock into the network and talk about gigs.

Sometimes terabytes right data going both ways. And imagine if we had all that infrastructure set up everywhere all the time for whenever I'm you know, getting into the hotel versus the folks and I plug in somewhere. That's a great application for sure.

Yes, because I can turn it up get the data do the analytically download whatever I need to download right done. Well, you know, I we're at the win right and every one of these rooms has a Amazon Alexa in it, right? Oh, you're gonna fire what?

Okay. Yeah, but you think about it, right every day. You've got people checking in checking out think of how many Alexis think of how many calls that is you couldn't plan for scale for that the 60,000 people coming here for reinvent, you know, you can't capacity plan serverless lets you just say, okay.

We we match the Paradigm. We match the model sure everyone can. Physical exit opened the blinds all of a sudden and no sweat, you know, no problem.

That's what serverless that's what serverless allows you to do and anywhere so talk about reinvent it kind of what's happening for you here. Yeah. So, you know, we we didn't have a booth last year.

We've got a booth this year. So we've been kind of hanging out there talking to people and it's just been really exciting. We've got existing customers.

We've got prospects. We've got people who have never heard of Planet scale and we're just happy to be back in person and happy to be able to tell people you know, what we are I'll turn it into the existing Solutions and just kind of you know dig in with folks who are unhappy with their database or who are interested in a new one. Get exposure to a lot of folks that you know, we're all online and accessible digitally makes a difference when we're one place, you know wanting to find out more.

Yeah learning what we don't know yet and finding new things. Well, I love this conference. I mean you get you get people from every industry you get people from every level of seniority from Junior to senior Executives, you know, and it just gives you an opportunity to really test to talk track to test the what the marketing team has put a put in your hands and an opportunity to just really see, you know, this fall flat.

It's much easier to tell if someone you know doesn't resonate with your pitch in person than over a zoom when you know, maybe they're already halfway paying attention to something else anyway. Interesting. Yeah, I have another question about kind of data in the serverless environment for data people.

One of the first questions is where do I have and where is it? Yep. Because it's oftentimes not not managed or right done by a certain team is done by everyone.

We have somebody spins up an instance wherever and suddenly have a database running. Yeah proud. How does that how do you think about that problem in a serverless environment?

Where is my data? Where should it be? Totally?

Is it being governed in the way? Yeah all things you need to think about. Well, that's you know, that's a huge problem.

Right? And and I think that the trade-off of making things easier for developers. It's sometimes things get so easy that you end up with just in a kind of spaghetti data running all over the place.

And so, you know, I think the key for engineering leaders and the key for folks who are really trying to tackle this problem is establishing governance establishing best practices, and it's buying the right tools that make it as easy for your developers as possible to follow the right steps, right? Everyone just has a job. They want to wake up.

They want to ship code. They want to Delight their users surprise and Delight their users and they'll do almost anything that they can to get there. And that's how you end up with this, you know data strong all over the place.

So tools like what we Our goal is to provide a secure a safe an auditable environment, but one that's also is easy as a click of a button to get rolling with so people don't ever have to look and go. Well this isn't going to work for you. I'm gonna need this I'm gonna need that and then all of a sudden you end up with, you know, user data all over the place.

It's all about. I think it's all about buying the right software and establishing the right workflows. So that people can get done what they need to get done as quickly as possible.

But kind of within the well trodden path, you know, and there's there's taking shortcuts to be fast. There's also being efficient. Yeah, right.

Do I want to write that code? I've got this let me use that exactly developers think that time right? Like I have so many things to do.

I don't have to build all that myself. Maybe I want to build some other part of it. But if I can do that great I can move on to the other thing and something where at least part of the compliance process is I'm aided by that tool or by that product less to do later.

I'm happy with right and move on to fun stuff. There's reason people of hiring lazy developers, right? It's like, you know, because at the end of the day, you know you have To get done you have something to do.

You want to get there as quickly as possible? No one wants to take the long route when it comes to you know, giving something to a customer or building something. They want to get there the right way and the fastest way possible.

That's right. And you know all the tools in the world are here to try and help you do that. But you is a VP of engineering a CTO or something like that.

You've got to be able to make the Discerning choice or you end up with people just circumventing it and going around and doing what they want which you know with the amount of tools we've got these days is a dangerous proposition. There's a lot of choice. Yes.

Well cool working folks find out more about planet scale check out what you've got. Yeah. com check us out.

We have a great free tier. So if you're interested in just trying out Planet scale trying out the serverless database sign up spin up a database go play around with it. We just launch Planet scale boost sign up for the beta there.

We'll be letting more and more people in over the next few weeks. That's a query caching kind of materialization engine to help speed up your queries. But yeah, just try the platform out give it a world and you know, see what you see and give us any feedback.

Something you don't like very cool. Well, Nick. Thanks for stopping by my pleasure.

Great to have Nick van wieger and wigger and thank you with us here today and learn some more about planet scale. So please check it out some interesting technology with serverless. So always looking for ways to do things faster and more efficient.

Appreciate the time you bet. We'll see you soon with another great interview coming from reinvent at our win studio for Textron TV.